Every person you hire at an agency helps you make money. That’s not true in other businesses. You’re gonna you start a software company, most of your team does not help you make money. They’re all expensive developers. They’re not helping you make anything other than usually the product they wanna make.

That’s not true for agencies. Every single person you hire helps you make money and I mean directly helps you make money. So if you’re at all good at selling and getting your team members to do decent work and the more you specialize, the easier that part is, then it’s it’s actually kind of it’s foolish I would say not to hire unless you have of course health problems or these challenges that you know are currently insurmountable.

But if you don’t have currently insurmountable health or other such challenges, dig in. It’s time to hire. Alright. So I’m gonna share my screen. We’re gonna talk about this calculator, then I’ll share this around with y’all afterward.

I’m gonna make it bigger in case you’re on a laptop or something smaller than that even.

Okay.

So this is a general way of looking at how to afford things and can you.

So it starts with a breakeven calculator just to see, like, when am I gonna actually start making money, and we’ll get into all of those across these different tabs. The general tab here is just you setting your goals for good, better, best. Now in the intensive freelancing, which I think everybody here comes from, except Caroline, I don’t know if you did it. In the intensive freelancing, though, I’d say ten thousand dollars for your core project, five thousand dollars for your retainer.

My assumption here is your retainer average is about six months. It could be more, and, of course, your numbers go up if it’s more. We wanna also break down what it costs to run a project and what it costs every month to run a retainer. So if you are and this is why you really wanna get time tracking down.

Every single minute that your team member spends on something they shouldn’t be working on is literally costing you profit. So this all comes from, a variety of things. So we have to figure out what your salary is, what their salary is, how much time, how many hours it takes to do a project, usually about fifty is what we’re trying to budget, and how many hours it takes to to do a retainer every month, usually about twenty. And, again, you can see that if this suddenly takes thirty hours, now the project just got more expensive or the retainer just got more expensive. It takes forty hours, people are just pissing away your time. Now a project that should have cost a little over a grand cost you two, and that’s real money.

Actual money that you could just not do the work and just sit there, and that would be better than you waste energy on low profit projects. So we don’t want to have our numbers go up, our hours go up as soon as they do. It’s really like, the math is right there. It’s a lot.

We don’t want that. Don’t do it. And, of course, the more, expensive people, spend time on things, the less profit you have. So let’s say if you didn’t have a VA or a junior copywriter or a copywriter working with you, that means a hundred percent of the costs are suddenly yours.

So let’s say instead, there’s that. So now with the project without me deleting those, the project is now forty four hundred bucks instead of being thirty two hundred bucks. Right? So it costs you twelve hundred dollars to keep hiring yourself for these projects instead of hiring help to get you there.

So when you think of that, it can be easier to think, oh, it’s gonna be expensive to hire someone. But the reality is it’ll cost you an extra twelve hundred dollars for you to just keep hiring yourself for this with these, like, basic numbers in play. So we don’t want to do that. And, of course, as your salary goes up now these are all in salaries that we have here.

All the taxes and other things that you might be paying. If you were at a hundred and twenty five thousand salary in Canada, you’re probably going to end up spending about a hundred and seventy somewhere in there. The government’s gonna take a whole bunch, and all the other overhead that comes with it. So a hundred and seventy five thousand now if you are even more expensive than that.

The copywriter salary doesn’t keep getting more expensive. If you hire someone for copywriter and biz dev, that doesn’t keep getting more expensive and the VA doesn’t keep getting more expensive but you do. So as soon as this goes up, if you’re at two fifty suddenly because you’re like I work hard then everything gets more and more expensive the more involved you are. So we don’t want to involve you more than we have to in things that you could hire other people to do and train them to do it.

But the question usually is, okay, well, Joe, when do I hire someone? The answer is usually you should have already, but there’s another way to look at it. So what I want you to do is think about and I’m gonna share this with you afterward and I want you just to, like, put your own numbers in here. And you might find that you have to adjust them of the math, etcetera.

That’s fine.

That’s totally cool. This was me doing this all in an assumption of what goes on for people when they follow a general rule of project plus retainer. Every other month you get every month you get one new retainer in the last six months. Okay.

So this is the good year project projection where the year was about five hundred thousand where we have twenty projects and retainers are at sixty. I think that’s what we’re working with here. They take fifty hours a week. This is the breakdown of hours when you go through this.

Profit is showing up here. You as the CEO, if you were the only person doing the work here, you would actually max out at month four. You’ve got two projects a month and three retainers a month. You max out on available hours.

There’s nothing else left. There’s not there’s no time for biz dev in there. Nope. Even here, you have five hours a week for biz dev this month.

So when we think about that, you’re not gonna be able to grow your business very long. This is why a lot of people get stuck. They get stuck when they’re like, wow. I’ve got a lot of great work coming in.

I can’t do the business development work that my business needs me to do. So now here I am. I’ve got nice profit. I’m making good money.

I feel good about that. Anybody who’s made, who’s had a three hundred thousand dollars year and then found themselves dropping down afterward or wanting to drop down afterward is this is what was usually going on for you. And it’s just the numbers, They might budge a little, but they don’t lie. So if you’re going to max out, if you’ve got a hundred and sixty hours that you are technically selling, then what would that’s great.

That’s fine. You get you get nice profit, but you’re burned out. You can’t grow anymore, so we have to go back to this month maybe where it’s, you know, decent profit.

But, again, you’ve only got twenty hours in the month for biz dev, which means you’re working after hours or, again, you’re not developing your business.

No partnerships, no marketing, nothing going on and wondering why you’re only at five thousand profit, why there’s really not much left after you pay yourself and maybe your very part time VA who helps you run things a little bit. So this can be a deceiving little area to be in. I don’t need people. I’m making five thousand a month.

It’s not enough to hire anybody because nobody will come in for sixty thousand dollars a year and really make my life easier, but let’s look down. Once we’ve actually hired someone and we are bringing them on board, revenue has gone up because we’re open and available to actually do business development so we can keep bringing more projects in, keep converting those into more business, get those systems down. Right? Now we’ve got revenue of fifty thousand and salaries of about thirty three thousand.

And that sounds like a lot, but your profit and this is with all overhead built in, your profit is actually much higher month after month after month after month versus this one little month. Right? So you end up with profit of about a hundred and thirty six thousand. If you’re thinking like a business owner, you’re thinking shit.

If every person I hire is worth lots of extra money to me, I don’t wanna end the year with a hundred and thirty six thousand dollars just sitting there. I should have hired two more people along the way because I could afford them, and they would further explode my opportunities to grow. And I could bring in somebody who is going to be my salesperson or somebody who does account based marketing to get bigger themes coming in. I could have done that because I have all this profit.

But I decided to camp out in this little zone that feels safe. I don’t have to hire people. Everything’s fine. I can’t really do much, but it’s okay.

Right? It’s wrong. You’re gonna burn out. This is where you burn out. This is where life goes badly even though it appears to be going great.

So the ROI, the focus of today’s lesson is what is the ROI of hiring? The actual ROI shows right up here, and this is taking time for all of the right work. So we have basically a layout of what your life would look like if you were to start doing this right away. You bring a VA on board if you don’t already have one.

This is the person who in the intensive freelancing when we have week three where we show you your VA is doing this, this, this, this, this, and this, and here are templates for them, that’s what they’re trained on. They’re doing that work here. Week one, this is broken down by weeks. Basically, four weeks at a time, which is great because in the fifth week, your clients don’t need you in that week so you could kinda sorta take that time off according to this schedule.

Now you’ve got forty hours a week as the CEO.

Your VA, you’ve got them in for about five or six hours a week because you don’t need them to do other things. Anybody who hires their VA to be the copywriter, I know a lot of VA’s end up writing copy. I don’t understand who hires a VA to write copy though, especially if you are a copywriter.

What I would say, if you were like, I like the idea of having a good year like this where I’m free to close two projects a month and convert a bunch of those into retainers that last about six months and my profit is really good and I can see myself building a really nice business that grows, okay, then you should hire a copywriter right now. Recruit one right now. It’s expensive.

It seems to be in the short term, but we already have the numbers unless you can’t close a ten thousand dollar project. And we haven’t even talked about what happens if those prices go up. The project doesn’t change. But suddenly, we’re making way more. We can bring our retainer up to seventy five hundred, make way more, and the project and retainer stay the same. So we can see that there’s a lot of leverage ahead, but not if we keep doing everything ourselves.

So we hire a copywriter.

We don’t have a biz dev copywriter person yet, but we have them on the horizon. It’s in our org chart. Very likely, it ended up in your org chart. This is how much time you’re spending a week.

You’re working with clients, and you’re also dealing with this person shadowing you. So we have that under team slash skills. Now client time needed for the month, we’ve copied over from here. These are client time needed for the month.

They’re over here now. So as long as our clients as long as we have a hundred hours spent on client work, we’re good to go, which we do. We’ve got twenty, twenty, twenty, twenty, and then our VA is putting in this for admin work. Cool.

That’s covered. We can then allocate fifteen hours a week to training this that’s two full days of training this person who is going to be able to start taking on jobs the next month because you have spent an exhausting amount of time treating them because you planned your week to the hour. You’re not going overtime, forty hours. You’re not even putting in the normal sixty or eighty it takes to build this thing because it’s an agency, and every person you hire is somebody who turns their job into more money for you as long as you’ll spend the time on it and take the leap and hire quickly because we wanna get this person onboarded and taking on a little bit of client work a week.

So like every morning they’re doing client work and every afternoon they’re training, and you’re doing a little bit of the training to help them get there, but you know it’s important and we’re still solving for what our clients need from us. We’re still allowing ourselves to have business development time of twenty hours a month or a week, which is phenomenal when you think about how that would look if you were to manage your calendar that way. Now business dev also can mean administration and other things that help support the business itself, but it shouldn’t mean I’m doing payroll all the time.

You have to run payroll twice a month, and it’s for three people. So, like, it’s fine. You just have to hit yes on payroll, and then it’s done. But we are actually over.

We’ve got more than twenty hours spent on client work in this month. So that’s kinda cool, but we’re willing to do that because even though it means an actual expense to us, we allocated more than we were actually charging for and if needed to, we were training this person. So it’s an acceptable It’s the season of spending in order to get that copywriter trained up. You’re okay with it.

You can handle it. You still walk away with the business getting eighty four hours of your time in there and some VA time as well. Your team has been upscaled to the tune of a hundred and twenty hours and you participated in that which only makes you stronger as the person who’s doing the training. Then by month three, where we’re again going back to all of this and the salaries here match that.

So month two, you’re not making any money. Month three, though, you’re starting to make money because that person is now working more and more. So every one of these tabs all work together. So you can see that by the time you hire, so month four, you’re recruiting the next copywriter, month five.

And when this is happening, you’re gonna be like, this is too fucking slow. We have to go faster than this. There’s so much opportunity if I just keep hiring people. Month five, you’ll be like, I shoulda hired you three months ago.

And you may wanna actually think about that depending on what your pipeline looks like. But you’ve got month four where they’re being recruited. Month five, they’re hired and onboarded. And month six, they’re starting to do client work.

You can see that your client time is going way down in this period. You are now officially working on the business, not in the business, still doing things to help your team, but your copywriter is empowered to work directly with your new copywriter who also does biz dev work for you so that you’re not also entirely the person in charge of biz dev because we don’t want single points of failure. Why? Lots of reasons.

One of them is vacation time. Eventually this copywriter is gonna need a freaking break and you don’t wanna be the one doing that work when the copywriter goes away for a week. Nor should the copywriter come back and go, you didn’t do anything while I was gone. Do I have to do everything around here?

And then they’re burning out and you train them and now they’re ready to leave. We don’t want that. We want them to go on vacation.

Other copywriters this, they do this work. You might do a little more, but we’re even seeing that by this point, you’re not doing more. You’re still only up five hours. This copywriter was able to take over in that time, and now you get to start going on vacations too.

So you decide you’re gonna do this. We still have an excess of hours that we’re dedicating to clients. We’re not we’re not skimming or doing anything less than. We’re doing exactly what our clients need us to do if we’re keeping to the rules around how much time we spend on each project.

And if those change wait. Where are the rules? There. If these change, then none of this works the same way, which is why you have got to time track if you want ROI from your copywriting team in an agency.

And eventually, I want you to look at this and go like, I don’t wanna have these extra hours hanging out. If an hour of my time is worth what’s my hour worth? Ninety bucks And we keep a hun or we keep ten of them at the end of the month that we didn’t use that we like kinda pissed away on client work that we shouldn’t have been putting my time into, that’s nine hundred dollars wasted. That’s the copywriter at this, that’s five hundred dollars wasted.

And it’s time that we could have put towards something else. So you, to be successful in bringing copywriters on staff, anybody on staff, need to be a real stickler for this. We don’t want to be over. We want it to always be at zero.

This is a great month. We did exactly enough for clients and not a smidgen more, and we were able to grow our business and add new team members here. We’re a little over, so that that means we could do something in here or we could say, well, ten extra hours.

If we how much do we need for a project, for a retainer?

By the time we get here, we could take on another retainer if we can maintain this. What can I do up here to maybe squeeze this so we can add another retainer in sooner?

And maybe we budge some of these numbers around and maybe the team and skills part shifts a little bit so that you can take on another retainer. And now it’s the same amount of money that you’re spending, but you’re getting more out of it and making more. Does this all make sense?

It’s a lot of numbers in a spreadsheet, but CEOs love spreadsheets.

And there’s lots of different tabs to go through and we’ve only done this for Goodyear. We haven’t done this for better year or best year, nor are they updated so that we have got if this number changes, everything else here changes. So that’s not happening at this point, but you can imagine and hypothesize that if you charged a little more and if you sold a few more projects and couple more retainers because you know what you’re doing, because you’ve specialized, because you have time available to do biz dev instead of you thinking you have to do all the work yourself, that’s how we make money. That’s where the money comes from in an agency, and that’s why agencies are so profitable.

That’s why we’ve reopened agencies every every time we’re like, alright. Let’s do another agency. We got lots of people in the pipeline. Just gotta hire a bunch of copywriters, and then by the end of that, we printed cash.

So I’m gonna share this out with you. That is the takeaway.

I wonder what would keep you from hiring copywriters if you could see and see as we saw today. Let’s imagine that you’re able to spend more time on biz dev, biz dev being everything to do with partnerships. So you’ve got your workshop, and if you know you have thirty hours a week to do things like pitching, to partners, you could do your workshop in front of, doing all of your Instagram lives and everything that engages your audience, posting to LinkedIn, running your newsletter, all of that stuff that’s actually the most fun as a CEO, what’s really getting in the way of hiring and training copywriters to do the work so that you don’t do that work anymore?

I know not everybody’s hiring. Most people are not hiring at all.

What’s going on?

And it’s like a real talk. It’s not like, shame on you. But, like, what’s getting in the way? Is it finding copywriters?

Is it training them? Is it that you haven’t looked at the numbers and how unprofitable it is for you with your expenses and your skills to be doing this project and retainer work that it’s actually bad for business for you to do that work?

Anybody have any ideas?

Jess?

So I think for me, it’s two things. One is, yeah, finding a copywriter who would agree to get paid that much money because working with contractors, they’re definitely more expensive, but they’re really good. So then the oversight is, like, you you don’t really have to oversee them as much. So that’s the one thing. And then I think the second thing is like not knowing a hundred percent that the clients will come in. And for me, just being in this new industry and targeting a new type of client, I think I’ll get more comfortable with that as time goes on. But, yeah, it feels just kind of like a I hope that’s the way that it works, but I’m I’m not a hundred percent certain at this time.

Yeah. So the second part, hiring someone is an incredible forcing function.

You’re like, alright.

I got payroll.

I have to make payroll. I’m gonna go figure out how to bring more clients in for this. Without payroll, you can take the summer off. And then you’re like, that was a good summer, but I guess I still have to go do this business. Where do I start? Like, you shouldn’t have stopped. You should have been at this the whole time.

So there’s that. The second part is I think that you might be surprised by how many copywriters are out there who are actually talented and who would need your help learning how to do things your way with your unique, this is what we do and this is how we do it. But if you have that baked in, that training time so most businesses that are successful don’t hire the, like, unicorns that we talked about before.

You don’t hire the great copywriter early. You make you are that great copywriter. You’re making copywriter someone who’s really good at this, someone who’s really good at that, and then later hire them. And this this is, like, across the board.

Think of a business.

No business that I that I know of at all hires the best person when they’re first starting unless they’re VC funded, and that’s it. Otherwise, you gotta hire cheap and start training them. Every agency on the planet hires cheap trains, and that’s where you get, like, a bit of a churn. So every two years, you can expect that that person put in a crap ton of time learning under you, not making that much money, but then still going and then they’re like, cool.

It’s been a great two years. I found a cool job at a tech company. I’m gonna go take that. Of course you are.

But that’s why we’re always training new copywriters and bringing new ones on board.

So I think that part one isn’t actually true. You’re probably shopping in the copy hackers world. So what I would say is go outside of the copy hackers world. Those who haven’t discovered that their talents are valuable, go post that to LinkedIn, in LinkedIn jobs.

And then the second half, yeah, as discussed. So I get it.

I can tell you from the other side.

This is this is the reality. Go through to the numbers.

You don’t know what if people are coming. How what are you doing for marketing today? What are you doing to intentionally are you spending for one thirty hours a week on business development to marketing?

Right now, no.

No. How much are you how much are you spending a week on biz dev and marketing?

Not a lot, to be honest.

That’s why I’ve just been trying to work yeah. That’s why I’m trying to work through, like, all the intensive stuff and then get into, like, doing everything else. But yeah. Yeah.

So that’s where I knew you could hire you.

Yeah. Second version of you to do thirty hours of biz dev a week for the price of a hundred thousand dollars a year.

If you found a guest who could do all of the work with your brain for your audience and they cost a hundred thousand dollars, you get thirty hours of their time a week and they’re on, would that be worth it?

Mhmm.

It would be worth it, and that’s all it takes to hire a copywriter who frees you up for that. Right? A hundred thousand dollars all in. Most copywriters that work for CXL get paid fifty thousand dollars a year.

Fifty thousand dollars a year. They’re we’re not expensive out there, just in here. Just in this world we are. But out there, great talented copywriters are available.

Just stop looking within this network. It’s not gonna it’s gonna be expensive.

Okay. Yeah. But yeah. You were otherwise just sitting there doing client work. That is probably best outsourced to somebody that you train.

Yeah. Cool. But thanks for sharing that, Jess. And I think that’s the reality for everybody as well.

Katie says, I don’t feel like I know my offer well enough to hire or train someone in it yet. Also waiting on clients in the pipeline.

Yep. That’s the thing. The waiting.

Right? The waiting because you don’t get to do the marketing and business development at thirty hours a week would be, like, bliss. Like, you could do so much with a hundred and twenty hours a month.

There’s so much there. I wish I had a hundred and twenty hours a month to do that stuff. But yeah. And then I get that. I get that. You wanna make sure that you have everything ready to go to train somebody well on it. That’s fair.

What what’s getting in the way of you having everything ready to go? If it’s actually costing you potentially a hundred and thirty six thousand dollars in profit this year after paying yourself and team members well, if it’s costing you big profits, could you pause, go off to a little hotel room for three days, charge to the business? I know everybody has family and things they need. It’s a work trip. You’re going off and you’re sitting down with your laptop at a not good resort, I’m talking at a Holiday Inn by an airport, you sit there in your shitty room and you type out all of this stuff, you bring a big post it note thing and you’re drawing and writing and figuring things out.

That’s three days of your time, two hundred bucks a night, fifty bucks a day in food. It’s pretty solid excursion, a meeting with yourself in order to have what it takes to then move forward.

That’s my take on it. Marina, what what are you thinking right now?

I’m glad you did that spreadsheet. I have something similar on my whiteboard downstairs, and I was going like, figuring out those hours and going, I’m gonna run out of time. Like, I have not.

Yeah. So then thinking about, like, when to hire it. But my question then is, do you maybe this is really bad business sense.

Do you have a line of credit that you You should have two months for an agency, you should have two months worth of payroll in your account.

That’s it. That’s not true for larger businesses or for, like, other kinds of businesses, but that’s what you need there. So before you hire a person, especially if your pay is usually if it’s a thirty day invoice Yeah. If it’s sixty, obviously, that’s worse. But that’s sometimes the reality. So okay. But if you have two months payroll sitting in your account, you’re more than ready to hire someone unless you have reason to believe that the world is about to explode, which I know we’re all traumatized.

We’re all dealing with PTSD. Thank COVID and everything getting really weird. And then thanks ChatGPT for making it weirder right afterward.

But we’ve survived, so we have to, like, focus and breathe.

The world the the sky is not falling. And if it does, then it’s gonna fall for everybody, and then you’ll have to adjust course or, like, abort mission.

But we can’t build a business thinking the sky is falling. You just you won’t. You’ll go work for the government part time, like and your life will suck, just to be clear.

So I would say if you think you don’t have enough time to do that work, you you don’t.

Now what?

Just do less work? Yeah. But you still need the money. So we have to, like, hire and train people.

Right. Have those two months of salary ready to go. And that’s it. But you have to hire before you’re ready to.

Every agency that I run, I’ve put cash into it upfront, twenty thousand dollars upfront. Mhmm.

And that was what we ran with. Yeah. Okay.

That’s what that’s what I was wondering.

Like, if you put seed capital in just to, like Yeah.

Get you through that Yeah.

Bit and then You’ll take it back out, like, three of her months later.

It’s like a very brief loan from one business to the other.

And it’ll just work like a dog. So to Katie’s point about waiting for clients in the pipeline Mhmm.

And I said I’m in implementation. So I then would it make sense then? I just wanna know if I’m procrastinating or if this is, like, good sense.

So reaching out for workshops.

So then once I start booking workshops and hopefully getting some calls, so concurrent to that, starting to look for potential copywriters and continuing to, like, refine the process so it’s easier to train Yes, sir.

So that when I land a client, then I can bring that copywriter on.

Yeah.

And then just What we can say is if you’re not currently closing two projects a month, which is, like, on that spreadsheet, you’ll see you may be closing two ten thousand dollar projects a month.

If you’re not doing that, like, you don’t have pipeline that shows you can do that, then when we talk about the constraints that we talked about a couple weeks ago, to me, the constraint is you’re not bringing enough leads to close on the project or your sales process needs to be improved.

I want you bringing in at least two projects that you’re closing every month in order to be ready to hire. So once you have two months of those under your belt, I did two projects.

And, I mean, it really quickly though. It really quickly switches to, like once you sell the project, selling the retainer is easier, and that’s why the retainer exists. It’s not to, like, make your life harder. It’s to make it so much easier to sell more ongoing services that give you results to the same clients you just spent all that effort trying to acquire, where a ten thousand dollar project might, at some point, not even feel profitable to you. It should based on what we’ve already seen in the numbers, but it’s like, no. That’s the retainer is what we’re really going for. That’s the easiest money, especially if you do a great job with it and it lasts longer than six months.

But you need to first close those projects. So if you’re working with one core client, your constraint is you need more leads and you need more of those to close into your projects.

And then once you sort that’s like the assembly line. Right? That’s the factory of making your business and a client along it.

You can’t even do anything further. Nobody down the assembly line is getting anything. They’re all just sitting there going like, where’s the rest of where’s the shit? So you have to fix the frontage. You gotta start pushing more into the assembly line So lead generation is a big thing for you, which means if you are dealing with one client right now, or one or two, then and if they’re not the product based thing that we’re talking about here, then you should be spending a lot of your day on biz dev, a lot of your day, a lot of your week to get to a place where you can do all of this other stuff that we’re talking about. Does that make sense, Marina?

Yes. That is helpful.

But But I was like, it’s a little bit cart before the horse, I think.

So Right.

Yeah. But but but this is speed wins here. Like, go faster. Just like Right. Speed will win when it comes to building an agency.

I I can’t think of an example of when that hasn’t worked.

Get out there. Get your message out there. Put some lead gen forms together.

Start calling. Start putting your phone number on your website. Like, do things to get people to say, like, okay. Let’s do this.

Let’s do this. Not like this slow and steady wins the race. Slow and steady gets put out of business in, like, three months. Like, it takes no time for that to fall apart.

So up to. Okay.

Get those leads. Yamar Yamar everywhere. Andrew.

Yeah.

Thanks.

Yeah. All of these are are resonating with me. I have no problem coming up with, list of fears and reasons not to do things.

I think something that I’ve noticed that’s a little bit different from what anyone else has said is, I’m having a little bit of fear of, like, having all of, like, having a lot of clients at once.

So right now, I have three clients, and I’m subcontracting for one of them and have project manager for two of the others, which is helping but still not exactly what we’re talking about here. And, yeah, I don’t know. I I guess I don’t know. I I still feel very attached to the idea that each client is getting a good amount of my attention, and I really know what’s going on with them. And so, I guess I start to worry about the overhead the mental overhead, that comes with, you know, remembering, like, a bunch of different clients and what they care about and, you know, all all these details. So I guess I could use I’m I’m sure there are some practical things here that I have like, skills that I haven’t learned yet that where you still know what the client cares about, but you’re not necessarily all the way down the weeds the way that I am right now.

Yeah. So when you unpack me what care about looks like for you when you say that.

Yeah. I guess okay. So I guess it’s a couple different things. So on so in terms of what they care about, I guess that’s maybe not the right thing to that maybe that’s not exactly what I what I’m worried about.

I guess it’s like, when I think of the level of detail that I have to go into right now in order to, like, write a landing page for someone, you know, and I’m presenting the copy, it’s really detailed. It’s little things. It’s, you know, at the at the level of features and things like that. And, I guess, I worry that if I have more clients, I’m kind of juggling, like, am I gonna forget what this I don’t know.

I guess I’m just I’m just I guess it’s a it’s a fear, and I don’t maybe I don’t know exactly what I’m afraid of with that. But, yeah, I think it probably all just comes back to, like, a fear of responsibility, complexity, all of those kinds of things.

I I do. I get that, and thanks for clarifying.

I think about that transition from being the service provider to being the agency founder.

Do you know Will Reynolds?

No. I do not.

Okay. He started this big SEO agency out of Philadelphia and have the multiple locations.

He by, like, year end of year one, he was only showing up on kickoff calls and, like, important calls with clients. And this and, like, he was the face of his business. And if you think that wasn’t hard for him to say, like, okay. Some other people have to take over and present what what was good about it. What many things. One, it freed him up to work on the business and go out and be an authority.

The less you’re in front of your clients, like, this is just human psychology, the more attractive you are to them. The less access they get to you, the more once you do show up, they’re, like, excited. Like, oh, cool. Andrew’s here.

And I think that it would be valuable for you to start, you know, kind of meditating on that, like what would change for me my happiness and what signals would it give to my clients as well if I wasn’t the one who appeared to be doing everything.

So you think it’s valuable, you think, hey, they’re getting me and they don’t recognize quite that getting you is amazing. But once you start vanishing, now getting you is amazing.

So I didn’t show up for tons of my client calls at all. That’s what Rashi was for. That’s what Carolyn was for. That’s what Aaron was for. Other people did that job. Sometimes they fucked it up.

Delegate with risk of failure. That’s fine. But but way more often, they didn’t they nailed it. And so all you really have to do then if you’re worried about releasing that control, what’s the mechanism you can put in place to make sure that you feel in control? You show up for certain meetings and you do, like, recording reviews.

So you can record your client your team member presenting to your client, and then you have meeting with the team members under your team skills area on your sheet, that’s just like, hey. Let’s look at your recording, and let’s talk about it. And you can point out, here’s how you should behave differently. Here’s what you did great.

Here’s what you didn’t do great. That’s it. It’s a game tape for you. That’s it.

I know that sounds simple, but but the numbers are are like they’re just they’re not going to lie.

So if they’re if if you are too expensive put in front of your clients, which I would argue you are too expensive to be doing this work, then it’s like, tell your business brain you are mismanaging funds right now by putting yourself a high value copywriter on every project.

Isn’t that copywriter likely to burn out too? And aren’t they responsible for business development as well? And if they go, doesn’t our whole business collapse? I feel like these are those feel like bigger concerns than my clients might not get as much access to me, or they might not understand why that cross head was written that that way. Does that make sense, Andrew?

Okay. Good. I know I’m talking about this.

I get very passionate.

Muted myself. No. That especially that last part. Definitely, yeah, the cost cost is not doing it. It’s greater than that.

Okay. Cool.

Cool. Wonderful. Katie?

Hi.

Okay. This is all really good. Delegate with risk of failure. I just wrote on a post it to stay my periphery.

But I’m so I’m operating with, like I only have there’s a fix in my business.

Yeah.

That’s what I’ve got right now. I have oh, okay.

K. Yeah. And, so I’m, like, deep in this debt now. Like, that’s kind of all I’m doing.

I know I’m not moving fast enough. Just gonna say that.

But I’m wondering, like, how right now, yes, I have time to work on, like, training materials and, actually, what you described about having, like, a head down mapping everything out session, like, that’s kind of in my calendar for this week. Okay.

But I’m like, at this point where I have my, like, remaining nest egg, I’m like, does that does it make sense to think about hiring at all this point? I guess you said no if it’s two clients in the pipeline.

But would it be crazy to invest in ads at this point?

I guess, because I’m like, I I see the the hiring roots, and I trust the profitability of that.

Does it make sense with, like, limited funds to invest in ads to bring those clients in?

No. It yes. It makes sense. Have you done ads before for your services?

No. Okay. I bought a course, like, two years ago, and I have yet to watch it. So I’m, like, back also on my list of things.

Is it Claire Peltz course?

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It’s good, though. Okay.

So, yeah, watch the course.

Watch the short workshop I think she has. It’s actually better than the long one.

And it takes, like it’s an hour on a Saturday, and you’ll have an ad set up. And, actually, mine got rejected.

I remember when I did it. But it was I got I it was fun. I I took away enough that I could fix the parts that got rejected. But, yes to doing ads. Yes. Because you don’t have to spend that much money on them, but you really do have to figure out that offer. How are you going to get them to book a call?

Does it make sense to do retargeting ads? Is there a place where you can, like, buy a list that you can then upload? I know that sounds sketchy, but it’s actually not that expensive to buy a list.

And then it’s just a matter of uploading it, creating a look alike from it in Facebook.

And then yeah.

And I just don’t know if there are other places that are better than that other than I I talk about Facebook.

Maybe you meant Google Ads or something else or both.

So So my plan would have been add to the workshop with retargeting ads to my ROI calculator.

K. Yeah.

And then, yeah, and then that’s that’s as far as my plan went currently. And I’m it’s just like, in the background I have I wanted like, for example, Claire Pals is, like, a dream client that I would love to pitch this offer to. So I’m like I just am afraid, I guess, at this point of, like, burning bridges with prospective clients because I’m not like, that my, like, really, like, size are dream clients. I’m afraid to pitch them too early before I’ve, like, worked the kinks out of a new offer.

Then start with the semi driven clients.

Who’s the next tier down from Claire Pels? Who wants to be the next Claire Pels?

Yeah. I start there. And, I mean, we never talk about account based marketing here, but, effectively, you’re doing account based marketing. Right? Like, if you really want Claire Pels, you can really make that happen. It’s just it’s gonna feel like stalking and there’s going to be weird gifts involved.

But it’s all like a doable thing. It’s just, yeah. Think of it as account based marketing when you’re trying to get clients in right now. Like, account based marketing doesn’t scale as well as the rest of the marketing that we’re talking about, but it can actually help you land those key clients right away or the next tier down. So I’d Jess says, what do you mean by account based marketing?

If you even just Google ABM, account based marketing is where you say marketing to sales come together.

Instead of marketing pushing to sales, marketing and sales align, which is you sitting and talking to yourself and saying, like, okay. So here’s an account that we really want. What can we do to get them? It’s really all it comes down to.

There’s more to it than that, but that’s that’s effectively we’re gonna ship them. We’re gonna have a three tier process where we go phase or fear phase process. Phase one, we’re gonna ship an envelope to them that just introduces us to them. We have to make sure it lands on their desk.

So we’re gonna take an hour to look for their mailing address and freaking make sure it’s theirs. Okay. Fine. So we start the mailing process then seven days later, we know the package is supposed to arrive there or we did FedEx tracking on it.

We got a ping that said, hey. It arrived. Now we ping them on LinkedIn at the exact same moment and start a message with them. And if they still don’t reply, phase two begins and that’s another mailer.

And that’s LinkedIn plus maybe we call them. We get their phone number. They have seen our name now. So all in, you invest three, four hundred bucks in an account but if you can see it being worth thirty thousand, forty thousand dollars, that’s money very well spent versus three hundred dollars on a Facebook ad that might generate nothing.

You know, it’s just this takes time but account based marketing is is an opportunity when you’re really trying to just land some business.

Yeah.

And never underestimate the power of, like, hopping on a call, calling someone, especially if you are retargeting them. Have the call me number right in, like, your Facebook retargeting ads. It’s like, call. Like, call me, and then take the call, which sucks. And now you have to take calls. And they’re like, I don’t know who that person is.

But yeah. Does that help at all, Katie?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Actually, I’m rewatching Mad Men, so the account based marketing is, like, giving me good. I’m like, yeah. I can see how this how this can work.

Nice.

Okay. Thank you.

Cool. No worries. And Jess says, do you have a separate number for that? Eventually. I think for now, I just put your number out there. And you can set it up. Like, Zoom will sell you a phone number, and you can get phone numbers all over.

Our sales team uses their own phone.

We just I’ve put my phone number out there, and it’s just like, you’re my number. It’s in my signature.

Yeah.

Just take the call. And then if you’re, like, inundated with calls, that’s a high class problem to have. That means people are seeing it. And then you can address, do I need a new phone number?

Yeah. Cool. Awesome. Okay.

And, oh, their dog walker is here.

Alright. Any any other questions that we want to cover today? Does anybody did anybody arrive with other questions or more of the same questions or panic that it’s time to hire? It’s really actually exciting when you start hiring. I think you’ll find that you will you will rise to the occasion and make money.

Jess. Jess, come on. Andrew, what’s up?

Yeah. I guess so, you know, I I know I’m a little bit of a special case here. As you mentioned earlier, like, health health issues is definitely a thing for me.

I guess there’s I I feel a little bit like I’m sort of straddling two kinds of worlds here. Like, one is to, like, grow, grow, grow, build an agency, hire people as fast as you can, and the other is like, okay. Like, relax. You don’t have an unlimited amount of, like, energy Yeah.

Emotional, physical, like, all all of that stuff. And so I feel like I’m I’m trying to sort of, like, okay. How can I still do this, but also but do it kind of, like, on a smaller scale? And, like, I’m picturing, you know, can I do this with I have a, you know, maybe a business manager, a VA, and a copywriter or something like that?

Like Yeah. Does it is that still a feasible path, or am I screwing myself by trying to, like, be in the middle of two different approaches, and I should be, like, choosing one or the other? Or is there a middle ground that still is, like, credible and worth it?

Yeah. So a couple of things. One, you do need to plan for a future where you have clients and someone wants to go on vacation. And that’s where redundancy goes a long way. That’s why I’m, like, hire a few copywriters. Okay. Okay.

Also, I can’t help but think that this model is better for you because there are times when you can’t work or you don’t have enough energy for it. Right? Cody is saying something similar.

I a hundred percent get that. There’s a reason I’m on Zoloft. It’s like real I they’re not the same as yours. Don’t get me wrong. But I get not wanting to just be at the mercy of, oh my gosh. I have to do all this stuff. That’s what teams actually help with.

If I didn’t have Tina coaching, I’d be coaching. And everyone’s like, no.

And so Tina frees me up so that I can do other things. And sometimes those things are no things. Sometimes it’s just like I need Friday off because I didn’t sleep last night, and I’m kinda dying. And that’s my feeling today. I’m like, but I got a full day because I’m hiring another person, and I need a few interviews today.

So that just means that I’m gonna be low energy tonight.

But the goal is that in interviewing these people in a month’s time, now marketing is not my responsibility like it currently is. Right? So I know it sucks right now, and I’d much rather be napping, but I’m not.

And that’s it. But every team member I hire frees me up to do more. It’s not there’s no luxury. I don’t have a VA or an assistant as much as I watch Veep and want my own Gary. For anybody who knows Veep and Gary, like, I definitely want one, but that’s a luxury. I’m hiring people who free up my time so I can work on the right thing. So I would look, Andrew, at the, worksheet.

Once I send it out, go on team time, that team time tab and look under the CEO column. You can see that as you grow into doing more and more of the business development stuff, that might you might not need all of the time showing there. So you’ll see that there’s, like, by month three with this model knowing it’s not gonna work as perfectly as a model shows, but it’s a starting point. Right? So with this you’ve got twenty five hours a week on business development.

The reality is you don’t need twenty five hours a week on business development. You might need twenty five hours a month on business development if you’re working on the right things. So you then instead do ten hours a week on client work, five hours a week on getting your team in a good place, and another five hours a week on business development. That’s a twenty hour week suddenly instead of a forty or sixty hour week, so this doesn’t have to be as bad as it seems like because that’s what employees are there to do. Does that make sense?

It’s gonna be hard until you do it.

Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah. So I think, like, two having two copywriters and business, like, project manager type person, like, that that sounds manageable to me.

So Yeah.

And those copywriters, I mean, there’s a lot of good things to be said about hiring two copywriters together to work under you.

They’ll help you make content as well. Like, they’ll help in so many ways. Like, Carolyn was so useful as a team member, beyond just being a really great conversion copywriter.

Yeah. And she was actually in the copy hacker sphere for those who were like, where do you find one then? They’re there. So all of them are just like, I do good work, and I don’t wanna sell my projects anymore.

I just wanna, like, go work somewhere and do the work. Cool. I got you. But it’s not gonna be the same unlimited salary that you had when you were on your own.

Yeah.

I like to sound a lot.

Thank you.

Awesome. Thanks, Andrew. Marina, did you have something to add?

Well, I was just gonna say, yeah, where do you find these non copy hackers, copywriters?

And they are out there.

So it’s I mean, Carolyn was sitting in ten x FC. She would ask good questions.

So if I have access to freelancing school, look for the people who ask good questions.

And then, like, great. Like, you try to hire that person if you can.

Right. Start start talking with them. Yeah.

Yeah. Cool. Alright, y’all. Okay. I know we already have okay. We’re end of time. Oh, sorry.

Okay. Alright. So thank you, and be sure to sign up for the hot seat this Thursday with Ry to work through whatever thing is your biggest constraint right now or if you’re not sure what your constraint is or if it’s time to hire or whatever you’re working on.

You can talk through it on Thursday. Alright? And if you’re not in the hot seat, please show up for your fellow copywriters, and you can also, like, catch interesting insights by hearing what they’re going through and maybe even sharing your own story with them. Okay?